more complaints from 539 (someone has to be the squeaky wheel)

[richardharman]

HI   I AM THE MENTOR FOR TEAM 539.  This past season we worked to get labview working but had a very frustrating time with it.  It seems as if the training videos available through NI give information on everything except what a typical team needs.  Dee Tomzcak (coordinator from Virginia First) feels that you could probably help.  Last season I was able to contact by phone the engineers at NI who walked me through basic difficulties and we were able to get basic robot code (no autonomous or camera).  They are no longer available.  I felt that if NI had just put together a decent and prosaic (please look this word up if you don't know what it means) manual I would not have had to contact them at all.  with my busy schedule I felt that the forum model for learning left a lot to be desired.  More often than not, the information I received was misleading and the time differential made the entire process cumbersome and frustrating.

Here is what I need to learn, and what I would assume any new team or new team member interested in programming needs but curiously is completely or partially absent from any training materials I could find (and I spent an awful lot of time looking)

•  Getting joysticks to operate a drive motor through a victor.  (the video and sample code for basic drive is based on the 2008 code which has been modified but the training clip has not been updated).  Sylvia Chiu from NI walked me through this process in about two minutes after I had spent about 2 days trying to figure it out on my own.

•  Getting a joystick button to operate a spike and thus a motor.  (I still have not been able to do this and can find no complete instructions or sample code for it even though this seems a rather obvious need)

•  Getting a joystick button to operate a solenoid.  I spent about three hours one Saturday morning trying to figure this out, after which I called NI and once again Sylvia walked me through it in about 45 seconds.  The training videos demonstrated how to get the solenoid to work through the dashboard only but neglected to mention how to get the joystick button to do what the dashboard did.

•  Getting both victors (drive motors), spikes (auxilory motors) and solenoids to work in autonomous.  ( There may be good information on this in training guides but we never had time to get this far)

•  Of course, getting the camera to work.  From reading the forum, this seemed to give teams as many headaches as it did in former years so wisely I never tried.

Why is all this kept as such a mystery?  With only six weeks to build, design, and program the robot it seems that a more straight forward programming guide with concrete examples of tasks that all teams will need would be developed.  Typically spending two to three hours in a frustrating run around looking for the right information means the loss of an entire work day and did much to put our team behind schedule, which amplified our frustration as we went to competition to find Beta teams with an obvious leg up (but with no evidence of putting together coherent learning aides for other teams).  The fact that the information I generally needed was only a short phone call away to an NI engineer suggested that (A)  I had done my homework to the point I was able to with the information given and (B)  the training materials were poorly conceived and assembled, with far too many omissions and far too many assumptions that teams could read between the lines in learning how to develop labview code.

Ironically, labview is an excellent development tool with great promise and the engineers at NI (when I could contact them)  were extremely helpful and knowledgable.  Unfortunately, I have used up my trial period for using the phone resource to the NI engineers.   I think NI could be a bit more lenient in extending this service to teacher/mentors.  If any of them ever taught high school and got an idea of the time constraints on teachers I am sure they would be much more understanding of our situation.

Furthermore, if NI just worked with teams to develop a better training manual (not just the elite Beta teams who ooze professional engineering help and probably have previous labview experience), the forum and the phone help would not been needed to anywhere near the degree they currently are.

Sincerely

Rich Harman

team 539

[Joe D.]

Greetings Rich

I certainly understand  where you care coming from; like you I am a FRC mentor as well. I know that there are some holes in the documentation. Have you looked at the following links:

Getting Started with NI LabVIEW Student Training

http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/7466

FRC 2010 Training and Resources

http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-8923

How Can I learn LabVIEW?

http://www.ni.com/academic/lv_training/how_learn_lv.htm

There are also a large amount of examples available from the NI Example Finder. You can get to this by goto to HELP >> Find Examples.

Those links should help get you up and running, please let me know how this works out. Quite a few NI troll these forums and are always here to help. You might also consider contacting your local NI Field Engineer as they can help you by let you get involved with your local LabVIEW Users Group. I owe a good amount of my LabVIEW knowledge to the Advanced LabVIEW Architects of the Rocky Mountains (ALARM) user group.

Please let me know how this works out. Good Luck!

Joe Daily

Applications Engineer

National Instruments

[sciencewhiz]

There are a lot of examples on team 358's website, which includes a joystick and relay example. http://team358.org/files/programming/ControlSystem2009-/LabVIEW/

[Rwood359]

Ben Zimmer at LV Mastery is a great supporter of FRC.

The tutorials at these two sites are great.  Some are dated, but most are still well worth the time.

http://www.lvmastery.com/tipjar

http://frcmastery.com/